to change the arch the kernel builds for use the kernel configuration option under processor type and features called processor family... the makefile will then build the binaries with the appropriate flags for your arch

Edit: oops my bad I didn't see that this was in the sparc forum _________________~Jake B

Last edited by jbNet on Sun Mar 21, 2004 6:14 pm; edited 2 times in total

and why?
is there any sign that 64bit code will be faster in nearby future or will it take a while?

Why? Well, 64-bit code takes up twice the RAM and CPU cache. You need twice the memory bandwidth to get the same performance assuming you don't use 64-bit numbers. If you do, then you start to see the benifits, but the cache and bandwidth usage still hurts a lot.

64-bit is only good when you manipulate 64-bit numbers (which is done in software on 32-bit), or when you have >4G of RAM.

64-bit is only good when you manipulate 64-bit numbers (which is done in software on 32-bit), or when you have >4G of RAM.

Not even that. It's good when you want to use more than about 3G of RAM (dunno what the exact figure is for sparc64) in a single application. If you have 10G of RAM and you run 9 processes which each use 1G, there's no particular need for a 64bit userland.